Well I can still remember the time and place where people thought it was ok to suck on a fag in public.
They would even lend a fag to their friends or co-workers, who had run out of cigarettes at the time.
Then a fag became something entirely different.

I agree. That was how I stopped smoking. The break from tobacco while I had the flu was just long enough that when I was feeling healthy again, the very first smoke I lit up tasted absolutely foul and I never had another one after that. It has to be the best way to kick it. Heeey maybe I could patent my special flu treatments... oh damn, its running around in the wild already.

Actually that term is not uncommon and I have heard a number of IT professionals use it, even an IT manager in a fairly large company. The only issue I have is that some pronounce it like pewter and some more like pooter. I prefer pooter myself.
And why not talk about them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous? How seriously should you take them?

I have a small bedside lamp which used to be sufficient for reading paper books with, but found it to be useless when trying to read my new Sony Reader. Not sure why that is, but ended up using a cover with built-in light now.

Also the bus ride home during winter will require the light, interior lighting quality varies and last winter the drivers usedta turn off the lights randomly for some reason.

If you read the article carefully, it seems his name is the equivalent of "whose name has been withheld", and sure enough, the newspapers here are full of stories... "the drunk driver, whose name has been withheld...", "the armed bank robber, whose name has been withheld...", "the child rapist, whose name..."

Actually my ship will have a force-field extending out half a light year ahead, which is incorporated into the mass-convertor. We won't need to slow down at all to pick a planet up for fuel. I heard some ethecists mention the need to stop and check for life forms but I'm not sure if they were going to be on board for the first trip.

That has nothing to do with TF2 at all. There is no sudden change in the challenge of playing, or any real effect on the overall team dynamic or the need to keep moving and working on the team objective. Purchasing extras instead of waiting for them is most likely something you will do for your own personal amusement, after weighing up how much money you care to spend on a frivolity.

For instance, I don't really bother with extras for certain player roles that I don't use. I don't care if the spy has a new backstabbing weapon with nifty new sound effects; if a enemy spy gets behind me (and has clue) then I am in much the same predicament, regardless of whether said spy purchased what he is stabbing me with or if he just happens to never sleep.

Maybe you are choosing the wrong server. Some server descriptions include words like "achievements server" or "trading server". I don't use them expecting hard out action, I choose other servers. There is most certainly a lot of full on action going on, and play to win usually means support your team to make it win.

Look around, cities, states, countries can barely afford to repair their roads. We are lucky to get timer based traffic lights here, the cheaper option is ridiculous round-abouts where the main flow at peak commuter times makes it nearly impossible to travel in the opposite direction.
Traffic lights with sensible and convenient functionality? Sounds like 50's style sci fi visions of the year 2000. How many of those early authors predicted that we wouldn't even be able to do proper repairs on our major highways by now? The New Zealand answer is to reduce the speed limit to suit the unsafe roads.
And its not just poor little islands like NZ, there were reports just last year about certain states in the US not being able to fund road repairs and considering tearing up their hard-top to go back to cheaper loose gravel surfaces for anything that wasn't a main inter-state roadway.
Sure, we SHOULD be able to make clever futuristic technilogical enhancements to our civil infrastructure, but it won't happen unless it can be done cheaper than the current systems, which I don't see happening.

Yeah. What he said. Sure, misconceptions abound, but when the role really is "software test engineer", the job is a lot more important than just running scripts and trying to make the software break. I think this may vary vastly between employers, and in some (or most?) situations the management themselves probably don't understand what they should be asking for from their testers. The reality is destructive testing only covers a portion of the job, while to do the job well a lot of knowledge and imagination can be needed to grasp the entire scope and complexity of the software, knowing what goes on in the back-end data, what the users see and believe is going on with the particular parts of the s/w that they use, how action in one person's role effects what is seen by a user in another role - the tester needs to see the entire view which individual users may never be involved in.

I have great respect for the testers I work with (not least because they can handle a grumpy developer without hitting me) and often prefer to go to the tester instead of the B/A for answers. Development environments may differ, but when I have a nasty bug to hunt down which requires data to be set up in multiple integrated software solutions to get just such an error to occur between them, I can't imagine what I would do without somebody there with the knowledge and patience to go thru the entire scenario to reach the point where he can say "now press that button and watch what happens".

Sure, its still annoying when the tester comes back and tells me that little Bobby Tables just broke my database, but yeah, they do need to do the simple basics first as well I guess.